Interview with Griatch, Part II

This is a continuation of OpenArtBox’s interview with GimpTalk forum administrator Griatch. Griatch’s DeviantArt gallery can be found at http://www.griatch-art.deviantart.com/.

(Which open source art/design software packages do you
use? What, in particular, do you do with them? Response continued from Part I)

Griatch:  For hobby/art purposes, here's a selection:

 My main painting tool is MyPaint, it's a specialized procedural brush generator which is very powerful for creating brush strokes. It is intentionally limited in scope and meant to be used in conjunction with GIMP.

GIMP is what I use for post-processing and detailing of an image. It has all the features you need to modify and tweak colours, but also some very useful functions for painting. Before finding MyPaint, I did all my painting, from beginning to end, in GIMP without any trouble. MyPaint has better brushes, but GIMP has all the rest you need to create a finalized image.

Inkscape is a vector drawing program which is very good. I use it primarily for lettering comics and doing instructive diagrams and the like.

I keep wanting to really get into Blender, the 3D modeling software, but at this point I've done little more than fiddled with it. I also use Xfig (another vector program) and a bunch of others. Krita is another painter program which is coming strongly (focusing on natural media simulation), but which I've not yet really gotten into. 

OpenArtBox: What do you like about the open source software that you use? Which features do you find particularly useful?

Griatch: Apart from the features outlined above, I enjoy the fact that I can have a potential influence on their development. To take MyPaint as an example: There was a feature I liked to have - it was a simple tweak, so I simply added it to my copy of the code to use. Showing what I did to developers caused it to eventually go into the main MyPaint distribution. But even if the devs had decided against it, I could have kept using my private tweaked version working just the way I liked it. You cannot do things like this with a proprietary system.

OpenArtBox: What proprietary (non-open source) software packages have you used for art/design, and how do they compare to the open source packages you have used?

Griatch: Oh, I've tried a few. The only one I use semi-regularly is Google SketchUp, which runs fine under Wine emulation. It has probably the easiest-to-use UI of any 3D package I've seen. It's very useful to quickly testing out complex shapes from different angles. I have tried some demo versions of Photoshop and Painter and I'm sure they are great, but the lack of Linux support mean they aren't viable options for me even if I was willing to pay their hefty pricing schemes. Open-source software does all I need it to do.